Stuff

ComRes’s monthly telephone poll for the Daily Mail is out today and has topline figures of CON 42%, LAB 28%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 9%, GRN 6%. The last time the Conservatives reached the heights of 42% in any poll was way back in 2010. Full tables for the poll are here.

The poll also had a bank of questions on perceptions of the four Labour leadership contenders and whether people would vote for them. In my last post I wrote about how such questions really don’t tell us very much: none of the candidates are well known to the public, and how people would vote with x or y as leader is an extremely hypothetical question – what policies will they follow? How will the media and public react? Will the party be united, split or riven with dissent? I don’t know and neither do the poll respondents.

For what it’s worth though, the main finding here was how little there was to choose between the candidates. ComRes asked if people would vote for Labour with the four candidates, the spread was between Burnham and Corbyn on 22% down to Kendall on 18%. They asked who had what it took to be PM, Burnham, Cooper and Corbyn were essentially in a three way tie on 23%-24%. Given the standard margin of error on a poll this size, it suggests the wider public really aren’t that enthused by any of them.

@”Go on growing crops, providing services to the city, and sending their children to school, while enjoying an unaccustomed equality of women with men in the work place, I should think. Don’t knock it.”

It has clearly escaped your attention that Syria is a war zone-only the wealthy are fleeing.

The response of the Scotch Whisky Association: “The opinion encourages us in our long-held view that MUP is illegal when there are less trade-restrictive measures available.
We await the Court of Justice’s final ruling.”

I wonder what the reaction might have been if a judge in London as opposed to Luxembourg had put in place such legal hurdles to hinder the actions of the Scottish Government.

I’m not claiming Corbyn will uplift Lab vote in 2016. In my earlier post I was suggesting that Osborne’s [] Faslane announcement would give a Corbyn-led Labour Party a USP north of the border at the next GE in 2020. I would expect by the that a new generation of genuinely Left Wing Scottish internationalists would have taken back SLAB from its current owners. Perhaps with sufficient support to win back 30+ seats from SNP. Of course Corbyn has to be elected first and we cannot regard the recent Scottish MORI poll as being based on that assumption. It could yet be close if JC falls below 50% on the first ballot. Anyway my vote counts as a Golden Welsh Vote and I haven’t cast it yet …;-)

COLIN
“It has clearly escaped your attention that Syria is a war zone”

Yes, I had noticed, and thanks for sending the background material on the situation there.
I understood you to be hypothetically introducing the notion of a Russian intervention to settle matters – which might I suppose eventually occur.
Their presence in other ME countries in the past, including Yemen and Egypt, has not been entirely in ill-blessing, tending to modernise and certainly to suppress extremism, and they did so in Afghanistan, till defeated with US provision of anti-helicopter technology and then CIA and SAS support for the creation of the Taliban.